Obviously this a very simple argument, but the fight between Creationism and Evolution is a fight that doesn't need to be fought. Moderate Christians can use this to justify ending their part in the fight.

I agree with you, Rouge. Especially since your thesis is very,very similiar to Biblical Creationsim. Just take Genesis 1, remove the word "God", and you have the Big Bang theory.(Thats how I see it anyway)

Who caused God?!?!?

If God is a spitirtual being who's very existence transcends reality, He doesn't need a beginning.

To you perhaps Jediflyer, but Christians believe that God exists and he created the Universe and all its wonders. However, the book we learn this from is several THOUSAND years old. The men who wrote it placed their own perceptions into the Bible, which means portions of the Bible are written to deal with problems and beliefs of that time period, not with science. This lead into the denial of science, as evidenced by persecutions of scientists in medieval times.
I'm trying to give an argument that accepts both religion and science.

I've always believed that God is behind the Big Bang and everything, I thought it was obvious?! God is not bound to space or time.

And on the Science Channel they showed onece this craxy idea that there are 10 dimensions. The 10th is the dimension that inludes all dimensions. And other dimensions ripling and their ripples bumpig into each other creates matter/energy, and all that matter/energy was drawn together by gravity, and then after that was the Big Bang. But I don't buy it, it's totally unecassary. I just like to believe God is Cause.

The first-cause argument is not a very strong one, I'm afraid, for all the reasons stated. There is no way to "prove" that God exists, and if there were, faith would become extinct, and so would free will. (Imagine the moral equivalent of gravity--a force which can't be denied or even resisted, except temporarily. How much free will would exist in a world with such clear "proof?")

My favortie argument for *suggesting* that God exists is the fact that "God" is a near universal experience that appears to have no pragmatic function. What do we need a God module for? Many people have pointed out that belief in God has started as many wars as it has prompted altruistic acts (which have questionable evolutionary value anyway), and it does not in any way appear to be necessary for the survival of the species. Nor is belief in God necessary as a non-scientific explanation of events. Why a God? Why a being with spiritual qualities? Why not invisible gnomes, or magic ants who only appear when you aren't looking?

We actually accept the existence of things on far less evidence than this every day. One of them is romantic love. How do you know it exists? Just because you "feel" it? Oh, come on, now, personal feelings aren't proof! Because a lot of other people claim to have felt it? Lots of people have claimed to have been abducted by aliens, too. Find it, touch it, create an experiment that shows it exists, and then we'll talk "proof."

There was a time, actually, when romantic love did not exist. Lust existed, marriage existed, one has to imagine that emotional bonds between the sexes existed, but "love" as in, "you are in my very soul, tormenting me," was the invention of the troubadours in the 11th century, egged on by powerful and bored queens like Eleanor of Aquitaine, whose schmuck of a husband ran off on the crusades and left her alone without the Lifetime Channel. Before that time you will not find any evidence of romantic love in Western culture, unless you want to count monks sighing after Mary and Jesus (not necessarily in that order), or the heroic, brotherly-love-with-*emphasis*-that-might-make-us-slightly-uncomfortable of the great warrior epics. For a long time, Western culture believed that "real" love--not necessarily sexual--was between men. Women were like the cat or something . . . useful, you could get fond of one, but you know. They were *women.*

And yet, there are thousands of dating sites out there that people voluntarily give their money to, all in the hopes of discovering something we have no real reason to believe exists.

None of this proves God exists, of course, but there's better cross-cultural and historical evidence for his existence than for the existence of romantic love--something to remember when and if you find yourself pecking your credit card number into a dating site's sign-up form.

It's rather like a puddle waking up one morning? I know they don't normally do this, but allow me, I'm a science fiction writer? A puddle wakes up one morning and thinks: "This is a very interesting world I find myself in. It fits me very neatly. In fact it fits me so neatly... I mean really precise isn't it?... It must have been made to have me in it." And the sun rises, and it's continuing to narrate this story about how this hole must have been made to have him in it. And as the sun rises, and gradually the puddle is shrinking and shrinking and shrinking? and by the time the puddle ceases to exist, it's still thinking? it's still trapped in this idea that? that the hole was there for it. - Douglas Adams

Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too? - Douglas Adams

C.S. Lewis on the relationship between science and religion (from "The Screwtape Letters." The narrator is an experienced demon writing to his rather inept nephew):[ul]My Dear Wormwood,

I note what you say about guiding your patient's reading and taking care that he sees a good deal of his materialist friend. But are you not being a trifle naive? It sounds as if you supposed that argument was the way to keep him out of the Enemy's clutches. [...]

The trouble about argument is that it moves the whole struggle on to the Enemy's own ground. [...] By the very act of arguing, you awake the patient's reason; and once it is awake, who can foresee the result? Even if a particular train of thought can be twisted so as to end in our favour, you will find that you have been strengthening in your patient the fatal habit of attending to universal issues and withdrawing his attention from the stream of immediate sense experiences. Your business is to fix his attention on the stream. Teach him to call it "real life" and don't let him ask what he means by "real." [...]

You begin to see the point? Thanks to processes which we set at work in them centuries ago, they find it all but impossible to believe in the unfamiliar while the familiar is before their eyes. Keep pressing home on the ordinariness of things. Above all, do not attempt to use science (I mean, the real sciences) as a defense against Christianity. They will positively encourage him to think about realities he can't touch and see. There have been sad cases among modern physicists. If he must dabble in science, keep him on economics and sociology; don't let him get away from that invaluable "real life." But the best of all is to let him read no science but to give him a grand general idea that he knows it all and that everything he happens to have picked up in casual talk and reading is "the results of modern investigation." Do remember you are there to fuddle him. From the way some of you young fiends talk, anyone would suppose it was our job to teach![/ul]So in response to Douglas Adams: Ah, yes, let us be content with "reality," and not try to introduce bizarre and counter-intuitive elements into it in an attempt to make it "better."

Is it not enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe there are unexplained and wildly counter-intuitive forces such as gravity and the movement of subatomic particles at the bottom of it?

At least to G-D, time is irrelevant but thats not only limited to G-D.

The rules of Cause and Effect demand that EVERYTHING that happens was caused by something acting before it...My answer is that God caused the Big Bang

Who caused God?!?!?

Hard to imagine a being to just exist forever. No beginning and definately no end. But, time being irrelevent to G-D, which is the deal, humans find it unfathomable to have no beginning. Thats only because they've been conditioned and whatnot to depend on time so much.

God is an unnecessary step to reach the fact that we just don't know how everything got here.

Well, truhfully, nothing is neccessary, so thats right at least. I'd think even if G-D knew how everything got here, he may not want to know. Hmmm...if that makes any sense.

The men who wrote it placed their own perceptions into the Bible, which means portions of the Bible are written to deal with problems and beliefs of that time period, not with science.

To Rouge Null you must listen...and I'll add, Null, that when those people wrote those parts of the Bible, they were scolars. They knew as much as they could at that time and translated things as best they could. Hence, when scientists today write their journals and do their proofs, they're using the best ways to translate whats going on by todays standards. Now, imagine 3 millenia from now. These scientists brilliant words will sound to people 3 millienia from now as the words of the Bible sound to us. That, too, is hard to conceive. Science is meerely another language to communicate with. In time, it will seem antiquated, most certainly.

I'm offering a way to see Christianity and science as concepts that are not mutually exclusive.

G-D's been doing that for what seems like an eternity, but not blatantly.

Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too? - Douglas Adams

A very wise man, that. Whoever said you've needed this or that to enjoy the fruits of the garden anyways? Neccessity sucks. Even G-D agrees with that.

And on the Science Channel they showed onece this craxy idea that there are 10 dimensions. The 10th is the dimension that inludes all dimensions. And other dimensions ripling and their ripples bumpig into each other creates matter/energy, and all that matter/energy was drawn together by gravity, and then after that was the Big Bang. But I don't buy it, it's totally unecassary. I just like to believe God is Cause.

I saw this very program and came to the exact same conclusion because I am also a christian. Einstein never completed his theory of everything and no one ever will I assume.

Einstein believed God. There I said it.

IMO, physics should only be used for one purpose: to prove or disprove the existence of God.

its funny, a couple of weeks ago we did a sermon on this at the church i'm working at...

as i was preparing for that, i read a lot of stuff on the issue, and what i found was that nothing about God contradicted science, and nothing about science contradicted God.

There is no proof for God, no proof against Him either. And even if there was, i'm sure people would still find a way around it. God gave us free will, the ability to choose Him or not. If there was irrefutable proof, maybe that would interfere with that free will, maybe that's why there is none? just a thought

VadersLaMent: Freedom has never been detected by scientific instruments either--neither has justice or equality. Yet somehow we manage to believe they exist--or at least we claimed we did when we sent that letter to England which started that one war a couple of hundred years ago. Too bad it's too late to call it back now. Stupid of us, I guess, to start a whole war over something that can't be proven to exist.

For that matter . . . how do we know science exists? Find me a piece of science. Get me a detector that measures science. Showing me instruments that purport to be scientific does no good, since we haven't established that there's such a thing as science to begin with. There was, in fact, a time not so long ago when what we call "science" didn't exist at all, and it's possible--even probable--that a time will come when the thing we call science now will become extinct. So what business do we have in making judgements about anything's existence in the name of science--which can't be proven to exist?

The question of whether a person of reason can also be a person of faith cuts right to the heart of what it means to "know" something. When do we know something exists? When we can kick it? When we see effects around us, and imagine their cause? When everyone around us seems to believe it?

The "kick it" test is precisely the one Lewis was mocking in "The Screwtape Letters," since things you can trip over, while they have excellent claims to existence, make up only the tiniest fraction of what we claim to be "reality." By smugly boasting that God fails the "kick it" test, we are sawing off the limb we are sitting on with regard to anything that involves the slightest participation of the human mind--which is essentially everything.

The "effects around us" test gives us a little more latitude, but is still essentially an act of the human imagination. So long as what is real is what we can kick (or what we're sure we could kick, if only science were advanced enough, or what we can't kick ourselves, but can get subatomic particles to kick for us), then all of the drive and most of the conclusions of what we call "science" are negated as well. Don't let Isaac Newton's apple fool you--we know essentially nothing about gravity. Einstien had to split his Relativity Theory in two to accommodate it, and thus far none of the seekers after the Grand Unified Theory have brought us noticeably closer. What we call "gravity" is actually a vague, hazy make-believe in our heads, which we posit as the cause of why objects behave as they do. It might as well be fairies for all we know about it.

So, if reality is what we can kick, then gravity does not exist. We can argue that its effects do, since we can leap off a building and dive straight into the pavement, but gravity itself is a collective make-believe. Assuming that anything which comes solely out of the human mind is not real, then gravity is not real.

No doubt there are many unhappy materialists reading this and saying, "But that's different," probably because vaguely existential pop-psychologists have done an excellent job at communicating their ideas to the public, while physicists have done a terrible one. The vaguely existential pop-psychologists tell us that the human mind is a tricky thing, and that any idea it produces must be suspect without independent corroboration. Never mind that the very idea of corroboration coming from somewhere *outside* the human mind posits the existence of a non-human intelligence. We'll just skip over that part. The vaguely existential pop-psychologists do. Instead, let's focus intensely on congratulating ourselves for having created mental models of the world which match our observation of the "kick-it" world much more closely than those invented by our grandparents do.

Of course, to avoid a rude awakening, we have to conveniently forget that their mental models matched their obvservations exactly as well as our models match ours, perhaps better. Or, if we're absolutely forced to n

Clearly He has, or no one would believe He exists. He has just not been universally accepted. Big difference.

And before you yell "we can't have uncaused causes", well, you do have to make up your mind if you can, or not.

If you can, then, problem solved. No need for a "God".

If you can not, well, then no room for a "God", because that means an infinite causal regress (and God is forbidden to be "uncaused" as well by this logic) or a circular causality chain.

No, because if "God" is God, He doesn't have to fit into your model, which is temporal, finite, and limited to the physical realm. An infinite spiritual being living outside of time is not excluded by your paradigm, it's not addressed. God is the only uncaused cause possible.

Anyway, I agree with this topic. God created the Universe. There's nothing to say He didn't do it the way science detected it. Personally I believe the Creation tale to be metaphorical -- EXTREMELY important in communicating to us why we are where we are spiritually, but metaphorical nonetheless.

DorkmanScott, things don't have to be detected for people to believe that they exist, not when you have the marvel that is human imagination. We've come up with all sorts of nonsense, a great deal of which we are now embarrassed to admit that we once wholeheartedly believed (flying crones on broomsticks anyone?). Some of those beliefs are more persistent than others, particularly when the affect of believing has particular social implications, or helps assuage universal human fears and doubts.

With regard to cause and effect, our understanding that effects require causes comes from our experience of four dimensional space time. Rewind the universe to T=0, before spacetime was created, and we lose the rules that exist within it. We are in no position to say that the "potentiality" from which spacetime was created had any requirement for causes or effects.

Beyond that, our growing understanding of quantum physics shows that particles seem to pop into and out of existence, seemingly at random, and with no need for any definable cause. As a result of this, even on Earth we seem to be on pretty dodgy ground these days when me make as bold a statement as "every effect must have a cause".

[blockquote]No, because if "God" is God, He doesn't have to fit into your model, which is temporal, finite, and limited to the physical realm.[/blockquote] Says who?

If something, x, can exists (in whatever 'realm' you may choose) and be uncaused, then something that is uncaused can exist - period. Hence, no need for "God" per se, just the uncaused (i.e. x).

I.e. presupposing uncausedness is valid does in no way validate "God" per se. "God" is just one hypothesis, not the only hypothesis.

[blockquote]An infinite spiritual being living outside of time is not excluded by your paradigm, it's not addressed.[/blockquote] Yes it is. If nothing uncaused can exist, then nothing uncaused can exist, period. Spiritual or not, "outside time" or not. All those distinctions are completely irrelevant.

[blockquote]God is the only uncaused cause possible.[/blockquote] I hope you realize that that is a completely baseless speculation. Just a single random hypothesis you have chosen to elevate to the "only" one. Why is that?

There is only the choice "uncaused causes can exist" or "uncaused causes can not exist". There are no options, no here, no there, no exceptions for "spirituality", "outside space", "outside time" or any of those red herring labels.

It can exist, yes, or no. No other choices. If it can exist - no explicit need for a "God". Just the uncaused cause itself, which by no means by necesssity have to be a "God". If it can not exist, God can not exist.

Either or. And no, before you accuse me of this, there is no false dichotomies there.